


let's make a toast to the damned

by onyourchest



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 20:58:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onyourchest/pseuds/onyourchest
Summary: Catra is in tears when she wakes. She doesn’t remember the dream. Doesn’t have the first idea why.A brief search nearby reveals still active First Ones tech, and she vows to never return again.





	let's make a toast to the damned

It comes all at once. The earth-shattering realization that Catra has no clue what she’s doing. A forever war with troops for miles, and miles, and miles. More every day, and don’t you dare ask where they came from.

The old guard — if you could ever find the stomach to call them that — Hordak, and Shadow Weaver, and those hundreds of thousands of ships that brought stars from places farther than the sky; the ones who started it all; the ones who turned her into a soldier before she was old enough to know the world _child_, they all vanished too long ago to remember their faces.

Catra barely still remembers when it was.

She spends the following week wondering what might happen if she followed suit. Just… Disappeared. Like them. If Etheria would ever grant her the same blessing to be forgotten so easily.

At the end, or maybe at the beginning, Kyle tries talking her out of it. Lonnie, maybe. Rogelio. She doesn’t listen. They all blurred into nameless, faceless voices years, and years, and years ago. She doesn’t listen, and eventually they, too, leave her alone with her hurt. Lifetimes on lifetimes of pain trapped in Catra’s chest with absolutely no outlet for the steady building weight of it other than to conjure up false memories of people she knew in one of those endless befores like something close to a conscience.

“Just a little more time,” Entrapta tells her with Scorpia’s voice. “We’ll win for sure,” and, _oh, _if that isn’t the joke of the century. _Time! _Catra gave her whole _life,_ and the only thing time gave in return was every shred of everything she cared about ripped to shreds and stolen away. Not even her need for vengeance, the fury, or the anger, or the rage remains. She is, truly, empty.

_Time. _

Time is cruel.

Time won’t solve this.

She disappears the next day.

She doesn’t return to anywhere she knows, not any somewhere she’s been before, all of them places filled with ghosts and with memories of past Catras that used to exist before she became the monster in the dark for the rest of the planet. Instead, her legs take her down long, winding paths through the fringes of the Whispering Woods where some few stray villages still exist. Humble little nowheres tucked safely between the bark and the leaves. She rides in carriages when her feet are sore. When she feels that unrelenting scratch to put more, more, more distance between her and the past. The rivers, she crosses herself. No one left in these parts that might know how to work a boat.

She, though; she was a soldier. Still is, if she closes her eyes and blocks out the years and the years of solitude at the head of an army. An army she only led because no one else would, and she’d been angry for so long that the idea of _not; _of trying for peace, or throwing herself at Adora’s feet, giving up on every last wild fantasy about vengeance she’d harbored for years because Adora left her all alone with nowhere to go but angry and up, was too much to handle. Still is, if she shuts her ears to the whispers of _Lord Catra_ and the rush of families into homes just long enough to reach a stretch of woods where no one is still alive to recognize her. _She_ still knows.

These rusted up piles of wreckage still carry enough life within them to carry her far enough to play the role of far enough.

If only the world would hurry up and forget her. If only it came as easily to her as the others. Other famous faces of the Horde were bigger, meaner, harder, but somehow, at the end of it all, the only one they remember is her.

If only.

If only she could go back to being the unknown, two-bit child soldier she was all those years ago. Before the promotions. Before the invasion. Before She-Ra. She had to fight for scraps back then, had to fight to survive, but at least she was _happy_. At least no one recoiled in fear or swatted her money away like poison when the only thing she wanted was safe passage.

Rumors build, as they do, in the following weeks and the following villages. Hushed whispers about some terrifying secret weapon Bright Moon employed in the final hour of the war, according to some. According to others, She-Ra finally snapped further than snapped, and, Catra hadn’t realized she wasn’t the only one doing so poorly. But then, maybe she was_ — is_ — and maybe putting stock in rumors won’t get her anywhere useful.

And, yet, she does. She can’t help it. Being nosy has always been her strength. Threaded between every new escalating tale of disaster and fear like people believe it might just be the end of the world, is something else. A horrifying feline monster has been rampaging through the area, and some particularly strong and stupid men have begun organizing hunting parties.

Catra steals a cloak from the next market she finds, and the monster vanishes off the tongues of villagers more easily than tales from lost generations.

On a whim, she hops onto the back of the next merchant cart she spots, some rotted, wooden thing. Tugging the dull canvas of her hood further over her face, she promises to help against ambushes by the Horde, or bandits, or anything else that might find them here in this corner of a world not quite sure whether their war is still war.

Like that isn’t the worst joke on the planet.

One merchant is blind. The other, too young to know. They don’t recognize her. Obviously. The merchant — the younger one — tells her they’re stopping deep in the woods to forage for mushrooms and medicinal herbs. Catra only nods and climbs in. She’s more than fine with disappearing.

~*~

Her time in the depths — the places where not even the sun or the moons have strength to reach — is easy enough. Simple, anyway. No strategizing to be done, no battles to be waged, losses to recover, victories to follow. Nothing to be done but live. She sleeps under shelter built from tree roots so massive they make cities look like pebbles. She hunts wildlife to survive with nothing more than her claws and a dagger she stole off that kid merchant when it was finally time to go their separate ways. She lives.

Some nights, she wakes to branches snapping, hair on end, feral snarls, and sharp, sharp eyes glowing bright enough to be stars.

She eats well, those nights. Just as she appreciates the help, unwilling and unwitting as it is.

This new life, this new normal, it suits her. More than the Horde ever did, anyway. Out here, walled in by the cold and the dark; out here, with the fresh sting of cool river currents racing over her fur, the whistle of her blade through the air, the feeling of the hunt racing through her veins, she feels free in a way she hadn't known even after time alone on the highest balcony in all of the Fright Zone. The clouds, for all their distance, felt too restricting. Too suffocating, even compared to this self-made prison miles from the rest of the world.

But, then, of course they did. She always was at her best in a fight. Always sharper than ever when she had the opportunity to stalk around dark corners of training rooms, and combat simulations, and towns, and cities, and castles, waiting, and watching, and,

_Hey, Adora._ Tripping, and falling, and towering over her favorite body in the world, one finger pressed firm to their brow as they flinched, eyes shut tight, and the world fell away to glitched nothing stretching on forever, and, and, and,

A shudder wracks Catra’s body. Her chest tightens, her breathing quickens, and she stops thinking about it. It hurts when she does, so she doesn’t. She thinks instead of her new life, her simple life. Meat roasting over the fire, and the rush of the hunt, and finally, finally, finally no one to answer to. No orders to give. No worries to be had.

Simple.

Easy.

She thinks of how different she is. The way she breathes, now, each rise and fall of her chest unburdened by anything but the intangible weight of the air, and she feels free, feels like a brand-new her. No Horde. No princesses. No other worlds. Other galaxies. Other wars on other stars for other kingdoms unfathomably far away. Nothing.

Easy.

It’s enough, that. Until it isn’t.

She stumbles on a patch of land exposed to the sun some slow evening, carried further than she might have liked by restless legs and a distant mind. Vegetables are growing where the light pours through, no doubt the scattered remnants of some old victims of war, too sloppy, too scared in their retreat to notice or care. At first, she ignores it, returns to the river she’d been aiming for, and returns to her new old way of life. But. The sight of it scrapes at the back of her mind, night, after night, after night, and eventually Catra stops fighting entirely.

It becomes her new home within the week.

What she thinks is a week, at least. The sun shines and then doesn’t long enough to have been roughly that long.

Another week — and she _is_ sure, now, in regular exposure to the rhythms of time — and she’s eaten through the last of them. She decides then and there to make a garden with this patch of earth. To clear away the canopy and allow the light in more fully. To replant the seeds, and the bulbs, and figure out some way to bring over water from the nearby river. This thing, this gift, this random twist of fate, whatever it was, she doesn’t want to lose it. Not if she can help it.

Though, vegetables take _time_ to grow, so she decides to return to her hunting until she can sort through at least most of the details and roadblocks. The biggest of all being that she doesn’t exactly know _how_ to grow food. Ration bars never needed this much work.

Still.

She’s been out in the world long enough to know the basics. Seeds. Water. Sun. _Bam._ Food.

Meat was new until recently, too, and that mystery unraveled itself easily enough. Raw bad. Cooked good.

So.

Mystery solved — as solved as it’s going to get, anyway — Catra hunts. And she lets her thoughts drift, in the following days and the following hunts, to the question of how they might taste. Meat and vegetables, together.

Maybe, she thinks, vegetables could be cooked, too.

Time gets away from her, setting up the garden; she isn’t entirely sure how long it takes. It takes even longer to get _right_, so many attempts at anything other than onions — she’s fairly sure they’re onions, anyway — end in wilting, or dying, or never growing at all.

A solution does come eventually, almost too close for comfort to the last of the seeds she’d saved all those days ago, and soon, it clicks. Soon, she’s almost completely in tune with the moods of the soil. With the wind, and the sun, and the rain. Soon, she’s got something almost respectable. Potatoes. Peppers. She remembers those names from the markets. Those stubborn, stubborn, onions, too.

She thinks, some nights, that Adora might like this. Stepping away of the world they dragged into hell. Living free. Living for themselves.

But.

Then.

That sets her to thinking about other things. That loosens the chains holding back other memories, and she doesn’t let herself think about it anymore. This — that — is why she's here in the first place, away from the villages and towns, the cities and kingdoms. Metal. Fire. Death. She can still feel it in the distance whenever she hunts, hiding just past the trees, just out of sight. It isn’t done with her, whatever out there is still left; still breathing; still moaning, and groaning, and crawling along, and Catra will never, ever, let it have her.

~*~

Somehow, the garden stops being enough. Catra misses people. She misses crowds.

She wishes she didn’t.

It takes time to track down a village near enough to this new corner of dark. Longer still to watch, and wait, and think. To build up the courage to leave the place that has for so long meant _safety._

No one recognizes her when she does. She still has her cloak. She walks heavier. Less confident. Like a brand new someone purpose made to blend in with the crowd. Between the distance she doubtless has from the Fright Zone by now and whatever fragments of time might have passed, no one recognizes her. Her first few days back in society — in the closest thing to society she’s seen in too long to remember — she does nothing but _be._ She browses the markets; stalls, and tents, and stores, one after the other. She stretches her legs. She watches the crowds. She exists.

Weeks pass achingly slow before she finally builds the courage to speak. She pulls one job offer and another from the boards at the center of the place. Nothing strenuous. None that might lead to hurting other people. Wild animals she can handle, but every time she so much as thinks about…

All she can see is the monsters she served, and led, and lost. Demons in the shape of Etherians.

Sometimes, too, she sees Adora.

It makes her nauseous. So, instead, she accepts work from some someone in search of a specific herb. Another, leather. She knows the woods well enough by now to help. Besides, she’s _here_ now, and she’ll need money to do much of anything else.

She’s heard good things about the spices this place has for sale. The wine, too.

Maybe wine goes well with meat.

~*~

This time, the new normal that Catra builds; one of trading; of buying, and haggling, and disappearing back to her garden in the depths of the dark, lasts. This time, she feels more at peace than she has in years. This time, when she strolls through the markets, no one recognizes her for the actions of her past. She is, finally, nothing but another stranger displaced by the war. Another stranger with nowhere to go but the dangerous safety of the woods.

Even the glances of recognition she feels on her back, the shouts of _how good to see you again, miss, _as she steps up to her favorite stalls have changed. She is finally welcome.

For a time, at least.

She thinks the slowly growing constant of her presence is what does it. The naive belief that she could ever have anything good. Every new visit brings strangers watching her more often, and turning away sooner. She’ll have to disappear again if it keeps up, she knows. Let these people forget. Find a new village. Somewhere else to trade. Somewhere else to exist. To live.

_It__’s a shame,_ she thinks, satchel already half full with bottles of wine as she steps up to the stall that sells her favorite spices: some sort of sweet root that she doesn’t have the right conditions to grow, and things like _smoked paprika,_ _black peppercorn_, and the powder of sundried garlic. Things she would never be able to have on her own.

_It__’s a shame, _she thinks, _this place was almost starting to feel safe._

“Ah, miss, right on time. I have your usuals here and ready to go,” the man at the stall bubbles in that way of his, scratchy and smooth, like every con artist Catra has ever known. She lets herself crack a smile, hidden beneath the shadow of her cloak. The shamelessness of his act is easy to appreciate for each reminder of the past that it brings. It sounds like all the good and none of the bad. Like reminiscing on things that don’t matter at a pace fast enough to outrun the rest. Like sneaking around to learn things she shouldn’t know from the older kids and rushing back to brag to her one and only friend in the whole wide world.

In the end, she might even miss _it_ more than the spices.

Catra reaches to hand over her payment. The merchant does not respond in kind. He holds the package back, expression almost, _almost_ apologetic when he says, “Forgive me, but I have to ask — I am sure you must have heard the whispers — the princess, Adora? She-Ra?”

Catra _has_, in fact, heard the whispers. Lately, when the other market-goers notice her, She-Ra is the first thing off their tongues. Stories about how she vanished shortly after the war ended. And, had the war really ended? And, how she was reportedly empty, listless, drained of her very reason for being in those final days still around. According to the rumors, she left her sword hidden somewhere in the depths of Bright Moon castle, walked into the woods, and was never seen again. Irony of ironies, that.

“I have,” Catra grunts, and holds out her hand that much more insistently. She doesn’t _want_ to cause a scene, but ripping the package out of his hands and leaving before anyone realizes what happened would be trivial at best. “What of it?”

The merchant gives up in an instant when he catches the look in Catra’s eye. He practically gulps loud enough to hear and drops the spices into her waiting palm. “It… And, I have never seen her myself, so I could not say one way or the other, but it seems someone fitting her description has been — rather insistently, I might add — asking around the markets, lately. Causing several different kinds of commotions, that one.”

Catra snorts out a breath in frustration. The voice is one thing. His refusal to be concise is something else completely.

His face pales to a sickly grey. “She… This lady has been asking after someone. A very _specific_ someone. Someone that sounds an awful lot like you, miss.”

The implication stretches between them like eternity.

Catra turns on her heel and leaves. She storms, calm as she can, into the woods, and she does not look back.

~*~

The eyes follow her into the woods. That much is expected. She shakes off every pair but one. That much, too, is expected. It isn’t her. It couldn’t be her. Not really, not after all this time, and not for _this._ If She-Ra… No. If Adora disappeared, it has nothing to do with her.

But, just to be safe, Catra takes the long way to places further into the woods. Her garden feels too exposed, and so she refuses to return to for weeks until the feeling of eyes on her back is finally, finally gone.

Even then, somehow, she feels it. It returns, sometimes, when she roams the dark in search of food. When she bathes. When she sleeps.

On the first night the eyes follow her into her dreams, she wakes, and does not sleep again.

On the second, she keeps her dagger gripped tight in her hands and close to her chest.

Somehow, the watching is all it ever comes to.

~*~

On nights when the eyes cut like fire, on nights when sleep is too far to find, Catra sits perched at the top of the canopy, bathed in moonlight miles from the ground and invisible to all who won’t think to look past the branches and the dark.

Up here, she has time to think. Up here, she can breathe, free from the weight of a curious gaze just cautious enough to survive.

Up here, she spots a town in the distance. What’s left of one, anyway. The burned-down wreckage of a place the Horde must have rolled over years, and years, and years ago. No one has touched it since. It’s nothing but a crumbling ruin; concrete and stone falling to pieces at a pace unhindered by the presence of life, but, she could rebuild. Rebuilding would welcome those eyes even further, exposed as it is. Too many trees carved out to make space for shelter. But, she could make a home. Someplace _real._ Someplace more than the inconsistent cover of bushes and roots too uneven to protect much of anything from the rain. Four walls and a ceiling.

A river runs through the far edge of the town, some meaningless barrier against the trees. Grass is growing unhindered through the charred remnants of destruction. Any pathways that might have once been are long gone, overgrown by the plant life of this place, but the rubble could still be put to use. A little bit of hard work, and Catra could have something good.

She could have a home.

She swallows. Digs her claws further into the bark of the trees.

A _home._

She moves her garden over before the first hint of dawn.

~*~

Days, and days, and days pass before Catra finds any trace of civilization. Somewhere new, with new merchants, and new people in need of new kinds of help. People who won’t show the slightest hint of recognition when they finally see her.

She, in the process, stumbles back onto the clearing. _The_ clearing. The one that started all of it. Everything. The one where Adora found that sword. Where Adora left.

She avoids it at first. It’s a clearing. In a forest. Grass, and flowers, and trees. A million just like it have come and gone in her exploration, and this one is no different. There couldn’t possibly be any sort of grand revelation hiding in all that open space.

Still.

Enough nights pass, and she decides. She gathers the courage to check. To know. Just in case.

Before she realizes, she’s asleep, curled up underneath a tangle of monstrous roots like she used to back in her first long nights of hiding. She sleeps, and she dreams of pasts that never were and futures that never came. Adora staying, Catra leaving, the Horde never arriving, and the two of them never being _the two of them_ because without the Horde, Adora never had reason to come to this worthless rock hurtling through the middle of nowhere.

In one, war never comes. War never exists to come in the first place. The world is peaceful. Built by glass, and metal, and stone. Vehicles like the ones she knows navigate roads unlike anything she’s ever seen before. Dark streaks across the ground painted down the middle with confusing decorations. It feels like the Fright Zone, only not. Like the rest of Etheria, only not. The sun shines bright in the day, just like the moons at night. Thunderstorms and clouds like the ones she knows too, too well are only temporary, fleeting things. In the dream, she lives with Adora in a massive building. Some place that seems to exist for no purpose but housing. They’re… Happy. She thinks.

She finds Adora standing in front of a floor to ceiling window, overcast skies framing her in an almost otherworldly light, and she’s smiling, and smiling, and smiling when she sees Catra enter, eyes softening, smile growing, the beauty of hundreds of millions of stars condensed down into this one moment as she opens her mouth to speak, and

Catra is in tears when she wakes. She doesn’t remember the dream. Doesn’t have the first idea why.

A brief search nearby reveals still active First Ones tech, and she vows to never return again.

~*~

The eyes, the pair she could never shake, watch her through every day of the following week.

They even reveal themselves. Eventually.

Catra thinks, at first, it must be an overly curious villager. Maybe that’s all it ever was. Some string of brash, know-nothing teenagers come to investigate the newest rumors of the monster in the woods under cover of night. _The Huntress,_ they’ve taken to calling her, too much distance from the war and the Horde for anyone to believe _Lord Catra,_ public enemy number one, might still be alive.

She’s drying her hair by firelight, part of her latest hunt roasting nearby, when she hears twigs snap behind her. Not loudly. Not some predator caught unaware, or some stray animal hoping for a moment of peace. Not loudly, but intentionally. It’s how Catra knows. The eyes.

She tears her knife from the ground, turns, coiled and ready to pounce, and,

“Catra!”

She does.

Even if she manages to pull the blade back at the last second, even if the whole thing turns into two bodies tumbling and rolling uselessly through dirt, and grass, and mud until Catra is pinning the other down, practically straddling their waist exactly like she always used to when they were kids, and, and, and that _voice. _That _face._

Catra works her throat, mouth opening and closing uselessly, and,

“Hey, Catra,” the stranger says. Because it _has_ to be a stranger. Because it _can__’t _be her. Not with those blue eyes, brighter than the brightest stars, and not with that hair, still tied up exactly like it always was, and not when she’s _here_, not _now._ She looks older. Worn down, and drained, and exactly like Catra feels, and it can’t be her. It can’t.

Only. She’s smiling now, that little lopsided thing that was only ever for her, half open eyes, and sparking a heat in the pit of Catra’s stomach, and she sounds so, so, _so_ smug. So proud of herself.

Like she always was when she finally got what she wanted.

Catra laughs.

Or sobs.

Both feel so new after all this time that she isn’t quite sure which wins out in the end.

“What,” Catra tries, choking on the feel of her own voice. “What took you so long, Adora?”

A laugh, full-bellied, and deep, and exactly the way Catra remembers down to the faint, raspy tremble as it hits the backs of her teeth. She nearly cries again. “I wanted to be sure,” Adora says, and she reaches up slow, slow, slow to stroke the backs of her knuckles down the line of her jaw.

Her eyes flutter closed at the touch. Her claws retract from where they were digging into the flesh at Adora’s shoulders, and her breath hitches, and stumbles, and stops, and before she can even think to control herself, she’s asking, “About?”

“They say an evil huntress roams these woods.” Adora flattens her palm against Catra’s cheek, then. Her other over her waist. Her warmth comes bleeding in through the touch. Even here. Even now. Even surrounded by the chill of the night.

“Do they, now?”

“Mmh. They also say she disappears anyone foolish enough to approach. Whisks them away from the world for the rest of eternity.”

Adora is scratching that spot behind her ear now, a dull scrape of nails through her fur, and Catra’s eyes are shut, the rest of her purring, moaning, breathing deep and unsteady, practically seconds from collapsing straight into Adora’s chest. “_Do_ they, now?” Catra asks, again, voice distinctly huskier, more than a few notches lower than it was short seconds ago.

“Now, _personally,_” Adora says, and she has both hands set to work behind both of Catra’s ears, and oh, her chest is comfortable. More comfortable than anything she’s thought to sleep on in too many nights to remember. “Personally, I think this huntress sounds an awful lot like someone I've been meaning to apologize to.”

Catra purrs. It’s all she can manage, anymore.

She feels Adora nuzzling gently, hesitantly into her still damp hair. Feels her breathe deep, in, and in, and in, and then out.

“I don’t think I could have gone on if it turned out to be someone else,” Adora admits, and here, now, she sounds every bit as weak as she looks. As weak as Catra feels. All that false bravado and pride, gone. Nowhere to be found.

Catra wrestles herself free from Adora’s grip. She stares, and she stares, searching the depths of her eyes.

A quick glance back toward the fire.

“Hungry?”

~*~

Catra doesn’t ask. About anything.

Adora tells her anyway.

It all spills out in waves during their time between hunts, on long sleepless nights, and their visits to nearby markets. She, ever since Catra disappeared, had no idea what to do with herself. She hadn’t been ready for it. For everything to _end._

And, sure, maybe the world was ready, maybe the world was happy, maybe it was, but Adora didn’t know how to let herself believe. She didn’t have the first idea what to do when her whole life was suddenly _gone_. And, so, she became worthless. It happened immediate, and slow, and it creeped up her limbs one by one until suddenly, suddenly, she was drowning in it. She was a weapon no one needed, a weapon Bright Moon kept around because the idea of letting her loose had become something twice as terrifying as keeping her there, where she could be put on display alongside the trophies and jewels.

An accessory.

_Look, _they could say, _at how we easily we have tamed the Princess that caused so much destruction in our name. The princess who brought to us the end of war._

Adora doesn’t remember when she left. Only that she did.

Irony of ironies, that.

~*~

Catra doesn’t ask.

Every night, she expects Adora to go.

Every night, Adora stays, instead. As if there was never any other choice. As if she never considered doing anything else. And, it might not be her way of apologizing for what happened so long ago, but in the moment, it feels like it. Catra has her own share of apologies to work through. Adora staying means she finally has the chance.

Maybe this — what they have here, hidden away from the rest of the world — is their chance.

Etheria didn’t need them before. It can find some way to manage without them, now.


End file.
